Filling in the Blanks / Lückentest

I am still sitting around waiting for the school year to begin so I can be a student. I have almost gotten into the routine of not having a routine, and have gotten cold feet about a million times. Do I really want to be a student? Do I really want to jump into an intensive German course with a bunch of college age students? And, can I manage to place into Grundstuffe II (Advanced Beginner) and not anything higher because it's the only class that meets just in the mornings?

I attended an information session for the German placement exam last week, conducted completely in German, which I understood almost completely. My confidence began to grow (I can do this!) and worry set in (what if I place too high?). And then the professor put up some examples from the test, just to show us the format. The entire test was fill in the blanks: fill in the blank verbs, fill in the blank pronouns, fill in the blank prepositions, fill in the blank missing words.

I have never been a fan of fill in the blanks. I remember my first Spanish exam in high school, sitting in one of the cafeterias, having to fill in the blanks. To me, foreign languages aren't about filling in the blanks. You don't go up the a shop clerk and say, "I would like ____________." or "Have ____________ fresh bread today?" I can look at a sentence with blanks and know every word in the sentence and not be able to make any sense of it, finding my mind going blank.

So today was the long awaited day of the fill in the blank test. It was held in a lecture hall in the Germanistik (German language study) building that was built in the 1960s and meant to last twenty years. Forty eight years later, the building is kind of creepy and feels more than slightly dated. It was a good setting for this test.

After a short lecture (in German) about not panicking about the test and not cheating on the test, we received it: four pages of fill in the blanks. I had already come to the conclusion that this test was not worth panicking about. If I didn't place where I wanted to place, then my career as a student would come to an abrupt end. I was not under the pressure that Peter's students were in, as they had to place into at least Mittelstufe I (the level above the one I wanted) to earn credit back at their home colleges. This test mattered a lot to them. To me, it did not, which is lucky. It was impossible.

I played along with the first couple sections where I understood the sentences pretty well and could make some guesses as to what might go in the blank. On the third page I came across a reading. It was an "easy" reading because there were ten verbs given to you that you had to fill in the blanks using the correct conjugation. I think the story was about a farmer. It might have been about a farmer with magic beans, sort of like the old classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, but I'm really not quite sure. I wished I had a magic beanstalk I could escape on.

It got worse from there, and I wondered if I could even place into Grundstufe II or would do so poorly on the test that they'd put me in Grundstufe I (for which you had to take no test because you know no German). After a while, I looked at my watch and thought that I'd rather go pick Nikolas from school than even try to pretend to make sense of the rest of the test. I wrote a short essay on the front of the test (in German) explaining all the reasons why I wanted Grundstufe II, but most importantly that I knew more than nothing and less than much.

It must have been enough to convince them. Grundstufe II begins on Monday.